1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an annotation addition method, an annotation addition system using the annotation addition method, and a machine-readable medium, and more particularly relates to an annotation addition method and an annotation addition system for adding one or more annotations into an input medium file as well as a machine-readable medium having machine-executable instructions for realizing the annotation addition method.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the popularization of digital techniques, a large amount of media files such as audio files, video files, image files, text files, a combination of them, etc., have been created so far. The appearance of lots of audio and video files is convenient for people to vividly record and store various information items. However, as the amount of these kinds of media files increases, it has become a problem how a user can quickly find his desired file in these kinds of media files. In order to solve this problem, a method of adding one or more text annotations into a medium file is proposed; by using the text annotations, the content of the medium file can be described. In this way, the user can seek various media files by using the text annotations. This method of adding the text annotations into the medium file is called “medium file annotation addition method”. In other words, this method is adding key words (also called annotations) into an image, an audio segment, a video segment, etc. These kinds of annotations may be applied to various subsequent media-file-related applications, for example, multi-media management, multi-media retrieval, copyright protection, object recognition, etc.
A conventional medium file annotation addition method adopts human power to add one or more annotations into a medium file; it is apparent that the conventional medium file annotation addition method costs a great amount of time and work. When facing the media files increasing in amount day by day, it is hard or even impossible to add one or more annotations into each of the media files only by using the human power. As a result, the inventors of US Patent Application Publication No. 2008/0229192 propose a method of adding at least one tag into an image based on human-computer interaction. In this patent application, at least one ink annotation is considered as a beginning, then handwriting recognition processing is performed based on the ink annotation, and then the recognition result is used for generating at least one tag associated with the image file. However, in practice, most of media files, for example, audio files or video files do not include the ink annotation; therefore, as for the media files without the ink annotation, the technique disclosed in this patent application cannot generate any tag.
U.S. Patent Application No. 2009/0289942 discloses an automatic annotation addition method of automatically adding one or more annotations into an image. In this method, first an annotation dictionary is created, then lots of training samples are collected based on the annotation dictionary, and then a graph model with regard to the annotations existing in the annotation dictionary is created. Next an annotation model is created by applying iterative processing to the graph model; the annotation model can automatically add one or more annotations into the image. However, the biggest drawback of the technical proposal in this patent application is that only a content-limited annotation dictionary can be handled. That is, as for a new input image, if the annotation included in the new input image does not exist in the annotation dictionary, there is not any output annotation, i.e., the annotation processing fails. Furthermore this method needs to be performed in a fully automatic way. That is, a priori knowledge cannot be transmitted to the system by a user in the annotation process, i.e. the priori knowledge is wasted.